Everyone is very familiar with the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle that is the basis of today’s Good Management Practice. So what is the difference between Good Management Practice and Best Practice?
ISO, the International Organization for Stadardization, has a comprehensive set of guidelines covering a broad range of good management practices, all of which include a component on Continuous Improvement. Continue reading
Where was the QANTAS Board Risk & Audit Committee during the past 6 years of Alan Joyce’s systematic destruction of, at one-time, one of the world’s leading airlines?
Although there are growing calls for the sacking of Alan Joyce as CEO of QANTAS following the announcement this week of a $3b loss, there is a still a strong chorus of supporters saying the result is just a myriad of complex problems i.e. a death by 1000 cuts. To the outside world it looks more like Monty Python’s mutilated Black Knight maintaining “Tis but a scratch”. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKhEw7nD9C4) Continue reading
Risk exists everywhere – the problem is knowing what to focus on. ISO 31000 definition of risk as “the measure of uncertainty in a situation” hasn’t done a lot to clarify what corporate risk means for Directors providing “good corporate governance”.
In this article I address the challenge we face as Directors in dealing with the vast array of risk in a typical large organisation. I explain how to cut through the noise to ensure that corporate risk management actually protects and enhances the business, rather than obscuring critical reality in a fog of detail or a haze of misleading simplification. Continue reading
The Dept of Defence (Australia) assesses capability in 7 categories: Purpose, Environment, Organisation, People, Process, Data, and Material. Below I have used this methodology to lay out the guiding principles for achieving a successful Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) system. Continue reading
Risk Culture is the greatest myth perpetrated on business since the Y2K bug. Just like Y2K, an industry has now grown up around it assisting companies to improve their “risk culture”. The problem with “risk culture” is that it has been hijacked from its original practical intent to now being an impossible (and unrequired) philosophical pursuit. Continue reading